Exhibitions

A Hilma af Klint fan who visited the recent af Klint and Piet Mondrian double header exhibition at Tate Modern in London noticed something off about one of the paintings. Was it accidentally hung…upside down?
American tourist Katie Boyle was visiting the show with her wife when the eagle-eyed pair noticed that something seemed off about The Swan no. 14. For starters, a triangle at the painting’s center was inverted, which was not the case for any of the other works in the “Black Swan” series.
Closer comparison also revealed that the companion paintings all placed yellow tones, used by af Klint to symbolize masculine energy, and blue, to symbolize feminine energy, towards the bottom of the frame, while pink, used to represent spiritual love, generally emanated upwards from the central triangle. This was reversed for The Swan no. 14.
“It would be unlikely for an artist known for elevating and emphasizing the spiritual above the banal to deliberately place a representation of spiritual love below such a motif’s baser masculine and feminine components,” the women wrote in a letter sent to Tate Modern and the Hilma af Klint Foundation. “Especially given the context of the series’ other thematic constants.”
The couple’s minds were made up about the mistake when they referenced one of af Klint’s Blue Books, which was being sold in the museum’s gift shop. The Blue Books are a series of ten sketchbooks in which af Klint kept miniature, travel size versions of her designs, and they have since informed her catalogues raisonnés. This publication appeared to confirm their suspicions, showing the same work inverted, with the pinkish hues beaming upwards.
Hand-colored reproduction of Hilma af Klint’s The Swan no. 14 in The Blue Books. Photo courtesy of Katie Boyle.
Hilma af Klint Foundation’s CEO Jessica Höglund agrees that the evidence is compelling. “As Hilma af Klint created the Blue Books, we rely on them to show the artworks as she intended,” she told Artnet News.
The show was dismantled last week and the painting will shortly be investigated by the foundation’s conservator for any marks on the frame that might indicate how it should be hung. “The Swan no. 14 was mounted in the stretcher almost 40 years ago to hang the way it now is presented, so we need to investigate it thoroughly before making any changes in order to not harm the artwork,” Höglund added. “This needs to be done when the artwork is back in Stockholm.”
The work is currently traveling to the Netherlands before the exhibition opens at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, where it will run October 7 until February 25, 2024. This means that no definitive answer about how the painting should be hung is expected before next spring.
“There is only a period of about ten years that af Klint’s works have been so widely exhibited and the research has developed in step with the exhibitions,” said Höglund. “Hilma af Klint left over 1,000 works in the Foundation and even though she also left a large number of notebooks, there are not any notes on how the paintings should be presented. Hilma af Klint did not see her works The Paintings for the Temple as artworks as we see them today, but as a message.”
“I am an artist whose life runs oddly parallel to Ms. af Klint’s, and I feel strongly protective of her work and legacy,” Boyle told Artnet News. “We really just hoped the discovery could help others to learn Hilma’s visual language and to take time to appreciate abstract art.”
Boyle also alerted Tate Modern about her suspicions by email on August 28th but never heard back. Artnet News has also reached out to the museum but did not receive a response by press time.
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The annual Berlin Art Week is launching this week, running from September 12 through 16, which means that across town there are more cultural events and art openings than one could ever hope to attend.
The Berlin art scene feels more vibrant than ever, with new directors warmed up at most of the city’s major institutions, from the Haus am Waldsee, where Nina Beier and Bob Kil will have performances, to guided tours of the newly hung collection at the Hamburger Bahnhof. There are also some entirely new spaces like the private photo-focused museum Fotografiska, which will open its doors on Thursday after a multi-year renovation of a historic Berlin arcade. As always, Berlin’s gallery scene is showing a diverse array of solo exhibitions, from Paul McCarthy at Max Hetzler to Jeremy Deller at Meyer Riegger.
We’ve selected a few of the buzziest shows, performances, and exhibitions that you won’t want to miss.

Perform! at Neue Nationalgalerie

The Neue Nationalgalerie will host another edition of Perform!, a performance festival that debuted last year by activating different parts of the museum. Emerging talent Göksu Kunak is on the roster, presenting their new site-specific production “VENUS” on the terrace. A group of Berlin-based artists will perform Yoko Ono’s 1964 performance Cut Piece, one of Ono’s earliest performance works where the artist sat and allowed the audience to take turns cutting off small pieces of her clothing with scissors.
In and around the museum all week, there will be food, readings and interventions, and there is even yoga planned, as part of the Berlin Art Week garden program. Double bonus: Isa Genzken’s exhibition is on view inside the museum, in case you have yet to visit it.
The Neue Nationalgalerie is located at Potsdamer Str. 50, 10785 Berlin. 

Marianna Simnett, presented by LAS Art Foundation, at the HAU
Marianna Simnett, GORGON (2023), live performance (still from video used to train AI model). Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. Courtesy the artist, LAS Art Foundation, and Société, Berlin.
The Greek mythological creature of the Gorgon is a monstrous female with animalistic features; it also serves as the title and central motif in Berlin-based artist Marianna Simnett‘s new play, which will premiere at the HAU, commissioned by LAS Art Foundation.
Simnett is known for writing, scoring, and directing surreal and unsettling films that often use animal figures and the human body as sites of conflict and transformation—she is now making a foray onto the stage. Simnett’s recent works have also been exploring A.I., and for the new play, she is working with technologist Moisés Horta Valenzuela to bring that component into the show.
Presented by LAS Art Foundation at HAU Hebbel am Ufer HAU2. Check here for show dates and tickets.

Berlin Atonal’s “Universal Metabolism” at Kraftwerk
Credit: Mayra Wallraff
The sheer size and scale of the former Berlin central-heating power station, located in the heart of Kreuzberg, is hard to fully grasp, with a seemingly endless network of rooms and old turbine halls. It’s the location again for the annual Atonal, an experimental music festival that has developed an exhibition arm to accompany its music schedule; the curated show has drawn a lot of attention in its own right in recent years.
Called “Universal Metabolism,” it includes works by Billy Bultheel, Cyprien Gaillard, Mire Lee, Rabon Aibo, VALIE EXPORT, and Sonia Boyce. On the stages of Kraftwerk’s two night venues, the techno clubs Tresor and OHM, will be a packed program of music performances, some of which cross over with the artistic presentation.
On view at Kraftwerk Berlin, Köpenicker Str. 70, 10179 Berlin. Check here for show dates and tickets.

Nora Turato at Sprüth Magers  
Nora Turato this place is sick / always something…, (2023). © Nora Turato Courtesy the artist, LambdaLambdaLambda, Galerie Gregor Staiger and Sprüth Magers
There is an intriguing and beguiling ambivalence to the text-based works of Nora Turato, each of which distilled from the constant flow of words in everyday life. The detritus and ephemera of words cycling through the world online, in public and private forums, in advertisements, and in marketing, in news and hot takes, or just about anywhere else, become the material from which she works.
For her new show Sprüth Magers, her first with the gallery, she will present a series of enamel works and a mural that draws on early digital graphics; despite what first seems to be starkly minimalist, Turato’s works are the result of time-intensive, analog processes, with multiple layers of paint.
Turato will also be presenting new work at Performa in New York, which takes place November 1 through 19, 2023, and in a solo show at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 2024.
Sprüth Magers is located at Oranienburger Str. 18, 10178 Berlin.
 
Gallery Weekend Festival at Studio Mondial
Kimsooja, Meta-Painting, (2020/2023), Installation view, Kewenig Palma 2020, © Kimsooja, VG Bild-Kunst, Courtesy KEWENIG Berlin, Photo: Bruno Daureo
After a few editions of splitting Gallery Weekend’s energy between April, where more established positions are presented, and September, a time for galleries to present more emerging positions, the stalwart Berlin gallery platform is trying something new. Gallery Weekend Festival is taking place for the first time this year at an old four-star hotel that is empty as it is being refurbished by an investor.
Hotel Mondial has some old West Berlin charm to it—and the festival sounds like a slightly more honed and curated response to Los Angeles’s Felix Art Fair. Spread throughout its old restaurant, parking garage, and foyer, (unlike at Felix, no hotels rooms will be used) will be readings, performances, including one by Karl Holmqvist, presented by Galerie Neu; as well as video works, including Pauline Curnier Jardin, presented by ChertLüdde, and Cemile Sahin, presented by Esther Schipper. Lap-See Lam, presented by Nordenhake will be among those presenting sculptural works on view, and Berlin-based artist Raul Walch will take over the building’s facade, presented by Galerie Eigen + Art.
Gallery Weekend Festival is taking place at Studio Mondial, Kurfürstendamm 47, 10707 Berlin.
 
Coco Fusco at KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Coco Fusco, The Eternal Night, 2022. Production still: Courtesy the artist
The solo exhibition of Coco Fusco, called “Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island,” is the first major retrospective of Cuban-American artist in Germany; the exhibition also marks her first dedicated monograph, both of which seem overdue given the significance of Fusco as an artist who is actively involved in debates and advocacy for in the realms of post-colonialism, feminism, and politics in Cuba.
The survey of work will span videos, photographs, texts, installations, as well as live performances that reach back to the 1990s and up to the present. One of her most acclaimed and radical pieces, Couple in a Cage, will be presented. The performance documentation dates from 1992 to 1994, when Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña staged a piece called Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West, where they dressed like two “undiscovered Amerindians” and lived in a cage in public space. Fusco is developing a multimedia performance to accompany the show, which will be performed in early December 2023. She will also be having a conversation with dissident artist Hamlet Lavastida in December; Fusco wrote an article for Artnet News discussing with Lavastida his politically motivated arrest in Cuba and his release.
KW Institute for Contemporary Art is located Auguststraße 69, 10117 Berlin.

“The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time” at Schinkel Pavillon
Eric Isenburger, Jula in Schweden, (1937).
Together with the Brücke Museum, Schinkel Pavillon’s new group exhibition spans nearly a hundred years of art, considering works and artists that have chronicled state violence and repression in and around war time. The show includes works dating to the 1930s and 1940s by artists like Felix Nussbaum and Käthe Kollwitz in dialogue with contemporary artists including Simone Fattal, Nora Turato, Sung Tieu, and Lawrence Abu Hamdan.
That there is an ongoing war in Europe will certainly serve as the psychological backdrop for this show, which is curated by Katya Inozemtseva, who was chief curator at Garage Museum in Moscow until she left Russia after the invasion in Ukraine began.
Schinkel Pavillon is located at Oberwallstraße 32, 10117 Berlin.

“Unbound: Performance as Rupture” at Julia Stoschek Foundation
Pope.L, A.T.M. Piece, (1997). Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell Innes & Nash, New York.
Since the video camera became a prevalent, artists have been incorporating it in performance art—either as collaborative tool or a means of documenting and recording the otherwise ephemeral art form.
With works by artists including Pope L., Julien Creuzet, P. Staff, and Pipilotti Rist, “Unbound: Performance as Rupture” focuses on video art that breaks through oppressive ideology and history, with an intergenerational selection of thirty-six artists who explore how the body interacts with and refuses the camera’s colonial and violent gaze.
Julia Stoschek Foundation is located at Leipziger Str. 60, 10117 Berlin.

Penny Goring at Galerie Molitor
Penny Goring Royal Blue Forever Doll, (2023).

Almost exactly a year after the closing of the ICA’s “Penny World,” a 30-year survey show in London dedicated to Penny Goring, attention on the U.K. artist has grown tremendously; this September, Goring receives her first solo show in Berlin, at Galerie Molitor, one of the German capital’s new galleries.
Goring’s work oscillates between emotional states with a disarming candor: there are experiences of grief, fear, loss, panic, and anxiety coursing through her small acrylic paintings and drawings, as well as her doll-like soft sculptures, which are sites for fragments of her hand-stitched poems. Often made with modest household means, Goring’s highly personal oeuvre transcends through bare honesty into the universal.
Galerie Molitor is located at Kurfürstenstraße 143, 10785 Berlin.

“Edward Munch: Magic of the North” at Berlinische Galerie
Edvard Munch, The Hearse on Potsdamer Platz, (1902) Photo: © MUNCH, Oslo / Sidsel de Jong
Though the painter Edvard Munch is certainly the star of Norwegian art history, his story crosses over with that of Berlin. The Norwegian Symbolist was a key figure of the vibrant young art scene at the turn of the century in the German capital, before the war disintegrated it and Munch landed on the list of “degenerate” artists.
The new exhibition, called “Magic of the North,” which has been organized with the recently opened MUNCH museum in Oslo, chronicles the artist’s Berlin story, including documentation of Munch in his apartment and studio, as well as parts of acclaimed the Reinhardt and Linde frieze that he painted for a theater in the capital—the works left the country once war began to tear the city apart.
The Berlinische Galerie is located at Alte Jakobstraße 124-128, 10969 Berlin.

Mimosa Echard at Heidi
Mimosa Echard, Private picture (what’s in your bag), (2023). Courtesy to the artist and Heidi, Berlin
The Paris-based artist Mimosa Echard, who is known for her delicate and clever works that mix collected natural and synthetic materials and ephemera, was last year’s winner of the prestigious Marcel Duchamp prize in France. She is having her first solo show in Berlin at Heidi, which opened in 2021 and has been putting forward an engaging program since.
The artist outlined her fascination with ambiguity and transformation in her work in a recent interview. “I like objects that create doubt,” she said. “In reality, they are fairly stable, but the transition through a moment of liquidity generates this vibrant, living sensation.” Echard is known for a poetic use of materials that is uncanny, but somehow harmonious in Echard’s careful layering: a poetic use of cosmetics, medicinal plants, bits of electronics, cherry pits, lichen, and snail shells, all coalesce on her canvases.
Heidi is located at Kurfürstenstraße 145, 10785 Berlin.

Hallen 4
John Armleder Flash, Flash, Flash, (2004). Installation view Hallen 4, 2023. Courtesy: Mehdi Chouakri, Berlin and John Armleder, Geneva. Photo: Hallen 4, 2023
Dealers, including Klemm’s, PSM, Mehdi Chouakri, Esther Schipper, and as well as out-of-town visiting gallerists Sies + Höke, Jan Kaps, and Max Meyer, are presenting large-scale works in the airy industrial halls of Willhelm Hallen. The Berlinische Gallery, as well as curators and collectors are also presenting artworks.
Hallen 4 is located at Willhelm Hallen, Kopenhagenerstr. 60-68 13407 Berlin.

The reopening of ngbk
Artists of House of Kal Karachi at a workshop with Karachi LaJamia (Karachi Anti-University), 2021. Image courtesy Fiza Khatri
It is no secret to say that the city’s art scene is suffering from rampant real estate speculation in Berlin, which has out-priced many artists from their studios (and homes), as well as more than a few spaces. One of them is the institution ngbk, also known as the neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, which had its home in Kreuzberg for decades before it was pushed out by landlords.
After floating for a year, the nonprofit has settled at Alexanderplatz, in a former McDonald’s branch in a 1970s building that was erected in East Berlin. It will be a silver lining to get to see nbgk grow and flourish in this new space, even though the decision to move came from such unfortunate circumstances; their opening show, called House of Kal, includes a series of community-focused radio broadcasts and workshops, as well as music, films, performances. With a central kiosk serving drinks and snacks as a meeting site for active discussion, the exhibition focuses on post-/migrant alliances between South Asia and Europe.
Ngbk is located at Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 11/13, 10178 Berlin.

David Douard at Konrad Fischer Galerie
David Douard UN’FOLD (2023). Courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie
David Douard’s sculptures and artworks deal with aspects of high- and low-tech culture and how these facets interplay with the reality human body, and he is among an establishing set of artists who have for nearly a decade been questioning the effects of the digital sphere on human life, intelligently contrasting nature and artifice.
With “ACHéTE LE NACRé à LEURS âMES”, the French-born artist is having first presentation at Konrad Fischer, where he is newly represented.
Konrad Fischer Galerie is located at Neue Grünstraße 12, 10179 Berlin.

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A tragic love story unfolds on September 11, 2001, in Avery Singer’s newest solo exhibition, “Unity Bachelor,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. 
Across a suite of densely layered paintings, three characters appear: the first, Unity Bachelor, searches for the second, their partner Priya Prasad, who has gone missing after the fall of the Twin Towers, while a third, unnamed figure—an aimless art student who bears a not-so-subtle resemblance to Singer—wanders the streets of downtown Manhattan in a drunken haze. 
The show, on view now through October 15, marks a semi-autobiographical turn for Singer, who grew up blocks from the Twin Towers. The subjects of the paintings—a tenement building, a cop car—were largely conceived from memory. At the center of the exhibition is a recreation of the World Trade Center office where the artist’s mother worked prior to 2001. 
“[September 11 is] a really hard story for me to tell because it’s a painful one,” Singer told the Wall Street Journal earlier this year. “I want to ground people in a narrative. Maybe I need another 10 or 20 years before I am comfortable using it as a subject. But I thought I would try to start now.”  
Installation view: “Avery Singer: Unity Bachelor,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Apr 22 – Oct 15, 2023. Photo: Zachary Balber.
The most recognizable images in the show are also the blackest, as if clouded by the pall of what transpired 22 years ago, or the fogged memory of it. Interspersed between these are black-and-white portraits of maquette-like figures—Singer’s signature, created in 3D-design programs and transferred to canvas—that are more abstract but no less haunting. The subject of one appears frozen in a harrowing moment of free fall.  
But 9/11 is not the show’s only touchpoint. As with previous efforts, Singer’s paintings are larded with art-historical references. One standout example nods to Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912).  
In Singer’s version, the young art student tumbles down a flight of stairs cluttered with empty cans. The image depicts both an instance of drunkenness and the sensation of it, but the vertiginousness of the scene—and the context of the show around it—evokes a loss of control that no amount of alcohol could match. 
See more images from “Unity Bachelor” below. 
Avery Singer, Free Fall (2022). © Avery Singer. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Lance Brewer.
Avery Singer, /Limelight (2023). © Avery Singer. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Lance Brewer.
Installation view: “Avery Singer: Unity Bachelor,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Apr 22 – Oct 15, 2023. Photo: Zachary Balber.
Avery Singer, Free Fall (2022). © Avery Singer. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Lance Brewer.
Avery Singer, JUUL Smoke (2021). © Avery Singer. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Lance Brewer.
Avery Singer, Free Fall (2022). © Avery Singer. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Lance Brewer.
Avery Singer, Black Out (2022). © Avery Singer. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Lance Brewer.
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The year 1965 marked a turning point for art and culture in East Germany, when the ruling Socialist Unity Party decided to take a hard line against the “nihilistic“ and “pornographic“ Western influences in East German theater, music, art, and literature, effectively banning films, records, bands, books, and various artists from appearing in public.
Jazz, however, was a tricky subject. While technically stemming from a Western capitalist country, the genre sometimes got a pass from officials behind the Iron Curtain on account of its African-American roots and the context of oppression. But it was on a case-by-case basis, with the GDR’s party line often oscillating between total rejection of the genre and tacit acceptance.
The jazz legend Louis Armstrong’s 1965 tour of East Germany is an example of the latter—it was an event that would later prove influential for a burgeoning and youth-infused East German jazz scene. A new exhibition at Das Minsk, a privately funded museum that opened on the outskirts of Berlin last year in the former-East German city of Potsdam, takes Armstrong’s famous tour through the Eastern Bloc as a point of departure.
How exactly the tour came about in the middle of the Cold War is a question with different answers. It later emerged, for example, that a Swiss intermediary paid Armstrong’s fee and, in turn, received antiques and 17-century firearms by the currency-poor German Democratic Republic. Handshake deals aside, the official protocol at the time stated that the jazz legend had received an invitation from the East German Artists’ Agency on account of his “activism against racism.” Armstrong’s tour dates were tightly packed, with 16 out of 17 sold-out concerts across the GDR taking place in only nine days, reaching an estimated 45,000 fans. He toured to five other socialist countries during that four-week tour of Eastern Europe, before returning to the deep social turmoil that was taking shape in the U.S.
Louis Armstrong with his ‘All Stars’ musicians and singer June Brown in the Friedrichstadt-Palast, Berlin. Photo: ADN-Bildarchiv/ullstein bild via Getty Images
The exhibition’s title “I Have Seen the Wall” is taken from Armstrong’s answer to a question posed during the Berlin press conference for the tour. When pressed by a West German journalist to comment on the Berlin Wall that divided Germany’s capital, Armstrong replied: “I have seen the wall, and I’m not worried about the wall; I’m worried about the audience I’m going to play to tomorrow night! When you get into the concert hall, forget about everything and concentrate on Satchmo.” He then added, however, “I can’t say what I want to say, but if you’ll accept it, forget about all that other bullshit.”
Indeed, the political tension present at the press conference stood in stark contradiction to the moving evening of the concert at the Friedrichstadtpalast in Berlin. Jazz pianist and artist Jason Moran, who co-curated the show with Paola Malavassi, created a 22-minute work for the show that looks at the two events side-by-side. The curators have also recreated the former concert hall’s lush stage curtain. Throughout the venue are works by artists including Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, and Gordon Parks on view alongside pieces by German and East German artists such as artist and jazz giant Peter Brötzmann, who passed away this year, as well as artists Rosemarie Trockel and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt. An excerpt of Pina Bausch’s Nelken Line is also on view, in which the legendary choreographer famously uses Armstrong’s West End Blues.
While the show does include some fascinating tour photography from the GDR Photo Archive and personal effects from Armstrong’s own collection—including a Selmer B-flat trumpet and a mouthpiece engraved with the jazz star’s nickname “Satchmo”—the curators are hoping to tackle larger questions with this show. With artworks by German and American artists, and a new commission by Los Angeles filmmaker Darol Olu Kae, the exhibition looks at the tensions between personal and political realities, individual voices within oppressive systems, and the power of music.
Jason Moran, jazz pianist and artist, co-curated the exhibition at Das Minsk. Photo: Cameron Wittig
“Das Minsk is a space to ask exactly those questions,” said Malavassi. “We’re interested in the ambivalence of the history of the space we’re working in. And we want to keep it complex. The questions we’re asking with this show are very relevant; they are about the production and reception of music, about racism and activism, then and now, about political statements, and the way we all participate in the political atmosphere of our time.”
One example of how the curators chose to bring certain questions to the surface is evident in the inclusion of a room-filling installation by Glenn Ligon from 2014, called Untitled (Bruise/Blues). It is based on a 1966 composition by Steve Reich, which uses a recording of Daniel Hamm, one of a group of Black men whose detention led to the 1964 Harlem Riots, recounting his experience of being wrongfully arrested and abused in police custody. Armstrong added the song (What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue to his repertoire during that 1965 tour, using his music to make a statement about what was happening back home.
View of the terrace restaurant “Minsk” in 1980. The venue is being revamped into a private museum.© Wohnungsbaukombinat, Photo: Heidemarie Milkert
Moran, who also recently curated the permanent exhibition at the newly opened Louis Armstrong House in Corona, Queens, put Armstrong’s tour into the context of his eventual return to the U.S.: “He’s 65 years old when he’s doing this. It’s not like he’s 20—he’s seen the worst of what the world has to offer. And part of his reflection is that he gets to go home and think, I’m now back in America, I’m in Black America. And now I’m also under this ‘curtain‘. He’s still disheveled at where his placement is in the Civil Rights Movement, what it meant in East-Germany when he was there versus what it means in Queens. When he’s home, I think he’s amassing a kind of understanding of what does his music mean—and this is late in the artist’s life. I see his return home and the actions he takes as a reflection.”
Armstrong kept meticulous audio diaries of his life—he recorded his thoughts and conversations, and always traveled with magnetic audio tapes. Granted unprecedented access to the archive of Armstrong’s audio files, the celebrated documentarian Sascha Jenkins released a new documentary in 2022, titled Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues, which offered a revelatory reappraisal of the jazz legend’s political stance, which he rarely commented on openly despite his struggle with racism in the U.S. Some of those tapes are being shown at Das Minsk, including the self-made, artfully collaged boxes in which Armstrong kept them. The sound of Armstrong cutting paper to make a collage once he gets off the stage, caught on those tapes, is just one of the unexpected moments that the exhibition will render accessible.
“We, musicians who travel the world often consider ourselves as exporters, and your job is to deliver something that’s maybe ‘foreign,’” said Moran. “Louis Armstrong has been delivering a kind of subversive freedom model, coded in the music itself. Jazz offers this sound of what people think freedom can be.”
“I’ve Seen the Wall. Louis Armstrong on Tour in the GDR 1965” is on view at Das Minsk from September 16, 2023, through February 4, 2024

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Lee Miller lived a life of many chapters—a Surrealist in 1930s Paris, a World War II photographer, a model for Vogue, a muse to Man Ray and Picasso.  
This fall, Gagosian will offer a glimpse into the American-born photographer’s private life and world with “Seeing Is Believing: Lee Miller and Friends,” an exhibition of work centered on Miller’s marriage to Roland Penrose, the English Surrealist painter, collector, art historian, and famed Picasso biographer. Curated by Jason Ysenburg and Richard Calvocoressi, “Seeing Is Believing” will open at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue location in New York on November 11, 2023.  
The exhibition will present photographs by both Miller and Penrose as well as pull back to shine a light on their social circle. Over the four decades of their relationship, Miller and Penrose cultivated an influential artistic and literary milieu during time spent in the South of France, London, and traveling in the U.S. After moving to East Sussex in 1949, the couple earned reputations as spectacular hosts—Picasso, Man Ray, and Max Ernst were among the couple’s many guests at their home known as Farleys House. Reflecting the centrality of these friendships in the couple’s lives, the exhibition also presents paintings, sculptures, photographs, and works on paper by these artists, plus Joseph Cornell, Dora Maar, Henry Moore, and Valentine Penrose.  
The exhibition coincides with a moment of renewed fascination with Lee Miller as an artist and person.  
The highly anticipated film LEE, directed by Ellen Kuras—which stars Kate Winslet as Miller during her years as a war correspondent and photographer—debuts at the Toronto International Film Festival this week. The film is based on the book The Lives of Lee Miller (1985) by Antony Penrose, the couple’s son. Meanwhile, Love Letters Bound in Gold Handcuffs, a hitherto unreleased collection of correspondence between Miller and Penrose, was released in the U.K. in July and is hitting shelves in the U.S. in November. The intimate letters reveal the depth of love, laughter, and tragedy that marked the couple’s 40-year relationship. “Seeing Is Believing” will likewise feature mementos of Miller and Penrose’s life together, including letters, albums, and ephemera that offer new insights into the couple’s private world.
“Seeing Is Believing: Lee Miller and Friends” runs November 11–December 23, 2023, at Gagosian Gallery, 976 Madison Avenue, New York
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Museums across the U.S. are busily ramping up for the fall season, with exhibitions celebrating both familiar and lesser-known names and movements. There is, in short, a lot to look forward to, with fresh scholarship around old favorites and discoveries from under-studied milieus. Here, our shortlist of shows to carry you straight through to the new year.

“Remedios Varo: Science Fictions”Art Institute of ChicagoJuly 29–November 27, 2023
Creación de las aves (Creation of the Birds) (1957). © 2023 Remedios Varo, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VEGAP, Madrid.
During her lifetime, Spanish-born Surrealist artist Remedios Varo was hailed as a cultural treasure in her adopted homeland of Mexico, where she had fled at the dawn of World War II in Europe. Throughout the 1950s up to her death in 1963, Varo created hypnotic Surrealist visions that blended imagery drawn from mysticism, the tarot, and psychology. Varo has risen to global acclaim over the past 15 years as art historians reassess the legacies of women artists in the Surrealist movement. “Science Fictions” marks the first museum exhibition devoted to Varo in the United States since 2000. This luminous exhibition brings together 20 paintings as well as materials from the artist’s archive, including notebooks, sketches, and personal possessions, that offer insight into Varo’s mind and the hidden orders and systems she saw in the world all around us. One of the gems of the exhibition Harmony pictures a composer seeking an “invisible thread that unites all things.” —Katie White 

“Ed Ruscha: Now Then”Museum of Modern Art, New YorkSeptember 10, 2023–January 13, 2024
Ed Ruscha, Hey with Curled Edge (1964). Courtesy of MoMA.
The show is billed as the most comprehensive presentation of the beloved artist’s work to date, and—somewhat curiously—his first solo exhibition at MoMA. It spans 65 years of the artist’s illustrious career and reflects his cross-disciplinary approach, encompassing 200 works produced from 1958 to the present. Fans of Ruscha will not be surprised to see the full scope of his output—paintings, drawings, prints, film, photography, artist’s books, and installations—displayed according to a loose chronology. Of special note is the New York debut of the artist’s rarely realized 1970 installation Chocolate Room, which lines an entire gallery with sheets of paper coated in the titular confection.  —Eileen Kinsella

“Abraham Ángel: Between Wonder and Seduction”Dallas Museum of ArtSeptember 10, 2023–January 28, 2024
Abraham Ángel, Self-Portrait / Autorretrato (1923). Museo Nacional de Arte. INBAL/Secretaría de Cultura, Mexico City.
It’s been nearly 100 years since Abraham Ángel painted his last canvas at just 19 years of age, shocking the Mexican art world of the 1920s. Although his artistic legacy has often been overshadowed by the circumstances surrounding his death, a new show at the Dallas Museum of Art makes the case that Mexican Modernism would not have been the same without the efforts—however brief—of the young artist, who channeled a newfound vitality in the 24 total works he produced in three years, four of which are thought to be lost. This important survey of Ángel’s oeuvre is the first of its kind in more than 35 years and the first dedicated exhibition of his paintings in the United States, exposing fresh audiences to the forever-rising art star. —Lee Carter

“Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas”Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.September 15, 2023–June 2, 2024
Alma Thomas, The Eclipse (1970). Collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Alma Thomas is one of those women artists whose profile has risen considerably in recent years—thanks in large part to the Obamas hanging one her paintings at their apartment in the White House in 2009. But while she had languished in relative obscurity following her death in 1978, the Smithsonian American Art Museum was well ahead of the game, acquiring no less than a dozen works by the artist during Thomas’s lifetime, plus 13 she bequeathed to the institution upon her death. Now, the museum is staging a traveling show of Thomas’s luminous color field paintings that also explores her methods and techniques, which remained innovative even as her health declined. —Sarah Cascone

“Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction”Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)September 17, 2023–January 21, 2024
Left: Ed Rossbach, Damask Waterfall (1977). Photo: © Charles Benton. Courtesy The Artists’ Institute. Right: Andrea Zittel, White Felted Dress #3 (2002). © Andrea Zittel, photo © Museum Associates. Courtesy of LACMA.
With over 150 works by artists around the world, the refreshingly brainy exhibition “Woven Histories” examines the little-understood intersection between abstract art and woven textiles—as well as pre-loom crafts such as basketry, knotting, and netting—over the past century, and their impact on society and beyond. While the connection may at first seem threadbare, the show argues that each is partially responsible for the other’s existence; they are inextricably enlaced with each other. “Much is telegraphed consciously and unconsciously through the significations of cloth,” posits Lynne Cooke, a senior curator of modern art at Washington’s National Gallery of Art, which helped organized the show. “Clothing underpins the myriad forms of art-making showcased in this exhibition.”  —Lee Carter

“Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick”Frick Collection, New YorkSeptember 21, 2023—January 7, 2024
Barkley L. Hendricks, Lawdy Mama (1969). The Studio Museum in Harlem; gift of Stuart Liebman in memory of Joseph B. Liebman. © Barkley L. Hendricks. Courtesy of the estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
This presentation of 14 early paintings by the pioneering American artist celebrates the remarkable figurative work of Hendricks through a focused group of portraits drawn from private and public collections. Starting in the late 1960s, Hendricks revolutionized contemporary portraiture by uniting portraits of Black figures with traditions of European painting. Here’s a serendipitous twist: Hendricks was one of many artists inspired by the Frick and counted it as one of his favorite museums, spending hours in the galleries observing iconic portraits by Rembrandt, Bronzino, Van Dyck, and others. —Eileen Kinsella

“Manet/Degas”Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkSeptember 24, 2023–January 7, 2024
Left: Edouard Manet, La prune (1877). Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Right: Edgar Degas Dans un café or L’absinthe (1875–76). Collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Patrice Schmidt.
This deep dive into the friendship—and rivalry—between Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas comes to the Met from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. It pairs masterpieces by the two French artists dealing with similar subject matter in order to highlight the similarities and differences between their artistic approaches. In addition to 150 paintings and works on paper, the blockbuster show will provide additional context about the two men’s friends, family, and the intellectual milieu in which they created side by side. —Sarah Cascone

“Fashioned by Sargent”Museum of Fine Arts, BostonOctober 8, 2023–January 15, 2024
John Singer Sargent, Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau) (1883–84). Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund, 1916.
John Singer Sargent is widely regarded as the greatest portraitist of his era. His elegant portraits of his wealthy clientele were particularly coveted for their sartorial stylings and his sumptuous depictions of fabrics. This ravishing exhibition of approximately 50 paintings delves into Sargent’s eye for style and the ways the American artist sometimes dressed and often modified his sitter’s costumes to exploit their effects. Among the highlights of the exhibition are fashion-forward paintings such as Madame X, Lady Agnew, and Dr. Pozzi at Home. Visitors will also be able to see several of the original garments worn by sitters alongside their portraits. —Katie White 

“William Blake: Visionary”Getty Center, MalibuOctober 17, 2023–January 14, 2024
William Blake, Satan Exulting over Eve (1795). Courtesy of Getty Museum.
This major Blake retrospective, co-organized with the Tate, was a hit in London in 2019–2020, and the L.A. stop was delayed by the pandemic. But now it’s here, and the Romantic wild man William Blake (1757–1827) is always timely. Yes, this is the show that had the two museums team up with Apple to unleash Augmented Reality versions of Blake’s visions into the world—but don’t be put off by the gimmicks (though by all means enjoy them if that’s your thing). “William Blake: Visionary” promises to highlight Blake’s most celebrated works via a bevy of important international loans, exploring his innovations in printmaking, his fusion of poetry and graphic art, and his glorious and passionate cosmology that has enchanted generations of admirers. —Ben Davis

“Dorothea Lange: Seeing People”National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.November 5, 2023–March 31, 2024
Dorothea Lange, Hitch-hiking from Joplin, Missouri, to a sawmill job in Arizona. On U.S. 66 near Weatherford, western Oklahoma (1938). Courtesy of National Gallery of Art.
Dorothea Lange is more than just Migrant Mother, her celebrated photo of poverty in California—but Migrant Mother does encapsulate something, specifically Lange’s ability to capture her subjects with directness, but in a way that also makes them represent something bigger and teases out a spirit of endurance and dignity. “Dorothea Lange: Seeing People” focuses on her rich black-and-white portraits made in the 1930s while she was working for the New Deal Farm Services Administration. Lange’s eye helped shape our memories of this era, so it’s amazing that the images still have so much power to move: from a grandfather solemnly hoisting his grandson on his shoulder at the Japanese internment camp at Manzanar; to an overhead shot of quiet, serious men waiting for unemployment relief; to a shot of a scrawny boy, child of impoverished tenant farmers in the Black Belt of Alabama, working the fields alone. Whenever I hear that government art support in the high New Deal era produced “no masterpieces,” I always reply by pointing to these images. —Ben Davis

“Bonnard’s Worlds”Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TexasNovember 5, 2023–March 31, 2024
Pierre Bonnard, Woman with a Dog (1922). The Phillips Collection. © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York.
The Kimbell’s first exhibition dedicated to the works of French painter Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) was inspired by its 2018 acquisition of Landscape at Le Cannet (1928). The show will explore the various sensory realms that drove the painter’s creative practice—from the most public spaces to the most private. It’s comprised of roughly 70 of Bonnard’s best works that span the length of his career, and will reunite celebrated works from museums in Europe and the United States, as well as many unfamiliar to the public from private collections around the world. —Eileen Kinsella

“Botticelli Drawings”De Young/Legion of Honor, San FranciscoNovember 18, 2023–February 11, 2024
Sandro Botticelli, The Virgin and Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist (‘Madonna of the Rose Garden’) (ca. 1468). Musée du Louvre, Département des Peintures, inv. 286 / L 3936 © RMN Grand Palais. Photo: Tony Querrec.
This show of 27 drawings is the first major museum show devoted to the quintessential Renaissance artist’s work. It will reunite rare works from across the U.S. and Europe, presented exclusively at the Legion of Honor—and is the first exhibition to explore the central role that drawing played in Botticelli’s art and workshop practice. The artist is best known for some of the world’s greatest paintings, including La Primavera (1477–1482) and The Birth of Venus (1484–1486), and he has inspired innumerable artists past and present. —Eileen Kinsella
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September marks the end of summer, back to school, return to office—and the start of art-fair season. Coinciding with Armory Week in New York, dozens of gallery exhibitions are opening across the city this week. From emerging artists debuting at new galleries and established artists presenting new bodies of work, it’s an exciting time to go gallery-hopping.
Looking at whose been generating a lot of buzz lately, undertaken important projects recently, and, frankly, whose work caught our eye, we’ve rounded up 10 solo shows that you should definitely have on your radar.
Sheida Soleimani, “Birds of Passage”Denny Gallery, September 5–October 7, 2023
Sheida Soleimani. Photo: Eden Tai. Courtesy of Denny Gallery.
Sheida Soleimani’s ongoing series “Ghost Writer” sees the artist construct elaborate photographic vignettes through which she “ghostwrites” the lives and histories of her parents (specifically within their context as dissidents in post-1979 Iran) and other refugees—those currently seeking asylum in Europe, as well as in pre- and post-9/11 America. The series debuted at Providence College Galleries and Edel Assanti in London, and earlier this summer went on view at the MFA Boston in the solo exhibition “Banner Project.”
Now, the newest installment goes on view this month at Denny Gallery in “Birds of Passage.” Here Soleimani continues her artistic investigation with her parents. Using her signature vibrant collaged backdrops and meticulously staged objects, Soleimani illustrates their lives and memories, hopes and dreams, offering a visual exploration of personal and collective narratives.
Sheida Soleimani, Dissident (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Denny Gallery.
Austin Martin White“Lost in the Sauce” at Derek Eller Gallery, September 5–October 7, 2023“Family Dysphoria” at Petzel, September 13–November 4, 2023
Austin Martin White, troubled heritage (book cover) (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Derek Eller Gallery, New York.
Based in Philadelphia, Austin Martin White has a double-header of gallery exhibitions going on view this month: a show of new paintings at Derek Eller Gallery, “Lost in the Sauce,” and “Familiar Dysphoria” at Petzel, which has announced concurrent representation of the artist. The artist’s simultaneous shows are a feat, considering his very first solo was held only last year at Capitain Petzel in Berlin.
For this recent body of work, White researched 18th-century colonial Mexico, in particular the genre of “casta” paintings, which served as a tool of racial codification based on an individual’s proximity to whiteness. For the artist, a large part of the impetus behind this line of inquiry comes from uncertainty surrounding his own familial ancestry; he uses his art as a means to explore notions of belonging. In White’s compositions, hierarchies of identity and historical memory are made material through layers of paint, acrylic medium, and spray paint across surfaces such as screened mesh, resulting in highly tactile, emotionally charged compositions that resist easy reading.
Austin Martin White, Three framed works (casta) (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.
Brandi Twilley, “Crest Foods”Sargent’s Daughters, September 6–October 14, 2023
Brandi Twilley. Courtesy of the artist and Sargent’s Daughters.
For her fourth solo show with Sargent’s Daughters, Oklahoma City-based painter Brandi Twilley created more than 40 small-scale oil paintings. In these works, Twilley revisits the time in her life when she worked as a cleaner at the local Oklahoma grocery store chain, and also the title of the exhibition, “Crest Foods.”The empty aisles and fluorescent lighting in several works evoke the idea of liminal spaces or backrooms, as haunting as they are fascinating. Tempered with moments of dark humor and natural beauty—such as a parking lot sunset—the show brings viewers into Twilley’s personal relationship and history with a specific place and time in her life. The artist’s brushwork is decidedly unselfconscious, with lights, store shelves, and text (sometimes legible, sometimes not), often painted in a single stroke, evoking the sense of looking at a hazy memory.The paintings also offer a poignant glimpse into working-class day-to-day life and realities, as well as the oft unseen histories and trajectories that ultimately inspire artists who also hold day or concurrent jobs.
Brandi Twilley, 7 AM (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Sargent’s Daughters.
Arcmanoro Niles, “A Moment Alone in the Shade”Lehmann Maupin, September 7–November 4, 2023
Arcmanoro Niles. Photo: Jason Frank Rothenberg Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin.
Arcmanoro Niles is best known for his almost impossibly vivid figurative paintings, wherein he has developed a technique of layering a range of bright hues that makes his canvases appear to glow. “A Moment Alone in the Shade” marks a significant shift in Niles’s approach, as it is his first exhibition of exclusively works on paper. Followers of the artist’s bold and colorful canvases won’t want to miss this exciting new development in the artist’s practice, which accesses a greater sense of immediacy and rawness.
Drawing inspiration from an archive of personal photographs, comprised of everything from family photo albums to pictures from old cellphones, Niles interprets and brings to life these personal, bygone moments while continuing to hone his mastery of color. Though known for focusing on the mundane and banal in his painting to explore contemporary narratives, this newest body of work offers a deeper investigation into ideas around memory, emotional vulnerability, and family ties.
Arcmanoro Niles, I Know I’m a Lucky Man (I Would Never Say Never Again) (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin.
Stacy Lynn Waddell, “light takes time to reach us”Candice Madey, September 6–October 21, 2023
Stacy Lynn Waddell. Photo: Lissa Gotwals. Courtesy of the artist and Candice Madey.
If you’ve ever found yourself mesmerized by the golden glow of a Gustav Klimt painting or a Japanese folding screen landscape with a golden sky, Stacy Lynn Waddell’s “light takes time to reach us” at Candice Madey should be at the top of your list of exhibitions to visit. The show follows Waddell’s tenure as artist-in-residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, which culminated in the large-scale project “Home House” on the façade of the museum.
Waddell’s second solo show with Candice Madey features a series of landscapes crafted from layered precious metals, a gilded portrait, and a collection of silver leafed, low-relief pastiglia works depicting. The artist used Winslow Homer’s 1899 watercolor and graphite After the Hurricane, Bahamas as a jumping-off point for this new body of work (19th-century American art and culture is a frequent source of inspiration in her practice). Through both the compositional and material elements of the works in the show, Waddell investigates man’s relationships with—and sometimes paradoxes of—nature, hierarchies of value, and social structures.
Later this year, Waddell will temporarily relocate to Umbria, Italy, as the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow, as well as to oversee the installation of A Moon For A Sun at Sala I, Rome.
Stacy Lynn Waddell, Untitled #6 (awakening after the Gulf Stream and the Hurricane) (2023). Photo: Kunning Huang. Courtesy of the artist and Candice Madey.
Eamon Ore-Giron, “Talking Shit”James Cohan, September 8–October 21, 2023
Eamon Ore-Giron. Photo: Fabian Guerrero. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan.
Following on the heels of “Competing with Lightning,” a solo museum exhibition at the Contemporary Austin that showcased works from more than two decades of his career, for his second solo exhibition with James Cohan, Eamon Ore-Giron expands upon his series “Talking Shit,” which he undertook in 2017 while based in Guadalajara, Mexico.
The multidisciplinary artist is widely recognized for his distinctive artistic style that synthesizes elements of indigenous visual cultures and craft traditions with modern movements such as Suprematism, De Stijl, and Concrete art. Presenting a body of work comprising paintings, textiles, and pieces in ceramic tile, the artist explores the nature and history of symbols, specifically those drawn from Mexico and Peru—as well as how those symbols are transmuted over time and across cultures.

Eamon Ore-Giron, Talking Shit with Inti (2023). Photo: Charles White. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan.
Awol Erizku, “Delirium of Agony”Sean Kelly, September 8–October 21, 2023
Awol Erizku. Photo: Michael Tyrone Delaney. Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly.
The Los Angeles-based artist (and Beyoncé chronicler) Awol Erizku joined Sean Kelly last year, and his solo exhibition “Delirium of Agony” is his first with the gallery. Interrogating cultural iconography from a variety of contemporary perspectives—hip-hop, art history, and sports, to name a few—Erizku deconstructs facets of the art-historical canon and history itself as a means of finding new ways of understanding culture today.
The exhibition will span the entirety of the gallery, and include work from a diverse range of mediums, including paintings, neon installations, photographs, sculptures, and works on paper, and employ what he refers to as “Afro-esotericism”: his unique Afrocentric aesthetic.
Erizku’s first monograph, Mystic Parallax, was recently released by Aperture, and the artist will be on hand to sign copies at the gallery on September 9.
Awol Erizku, Now Shoo, (Fly)Children, Stop Lookin’ at Her Tits (2023). Photo: Adam Reich. Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly.
Jane Dickson, “Promised Land”Karma, September 9–October 28, 2023
Jane Dickson. Photo: Dondre Stuetley. Courtesy of the artist and Karma.
Once described as “the painter of American Darkness” by friend and fellow artist Nan Goldin, Jane Dickson has lived and worked in New York since 1977. Inspired by the gritty milieu of the city in that period, her figurative paintings offer a voyeuristic glimpse into the views and lives of the urban underbelly.
Shortly after moving to New York, Dickson began working on the Spectacolor sign—the first animated-light board in Times Square. She went on to curate and participate in “Messages to the Public,” a text-based series of activations to which Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, and David Hammons also contributed. For her exhibition “Promised Land” at Karma, Dickson symbolically returns to this style of text-based works. Using her own archive of nighttime and nightlife photography from the past 40 years, Dickson has produced a new body of textual works by self-appropriating, cropping, and reframing her past work. Even remixed, they still evoke an atmosphere of “American Darkness,” adapted for a new era.
Jane Dickson, Save Time 2 (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Karma.
Bony Ramirez, “TROPICAL APEX”Jeffrey Deitch, September 9–October 21, 2023
Bony Ramirez. Photo by Elianel Clinton. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch.
The self-taught artist Bony Ramirez moved from the Dominican Republic to the United States at the age of 13 and has never returned. Though he has no photos from his early childhood, what he does have are powerful impressions of the country and culture—full of color and texture. Based in Harlem, and with a studio in Jersey City, Ramirez’s practice attempts to piece together, reconstruct, and imagine his life in the Caribbean as a child, as well as explore and celebrate the Dominican Republic’s culture and history.
In his exhibition “TROPICAL APEX” with Jeffery Deitch, visitors can enter Ramirez’s boldly colorful, imagined worlds, but are also invited to reflect on ideas around personal and collective histories, the boundaries of memory, and cultural narratives.
Bony Ramirez, The Annunciation (2023). Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch.
Ozioma OnuzulikeMarc Straus Gallery, September 10–October 29, 2023
Ozioma Onuzulike. Courtesy of the artist and Marc Straus Gallery.
Marc Straus is presenting Nigerian artist Ozioma Onuzulike’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, showcasing works from four of the artist’s series, named for the materials they emulate: “Palm Kernel Shell Beads,” “Yam,” “Honeycomb,” and “Chainmail.” A renowned contemporary ceramic artist as well as poet and academic, Onuzulike weaves messages around colonialism, migration, and global warming into each of his series.
Onuzulike takes inspiration from everyday natural elements and then produces them en masse in clay. These individual, basic elements are then meticulously woven and constructed into tapestries and hanging sculptures, metaphorically and symbolically referencing the many cultures and histories of Africa—ranging from the slave trade and its aftermath to revered textile and clothing traditions and Africa’s natural resources.
The time-consuming and laborious task of creating these works is a feat to behold, and rewards close study in person, as the meticulous details and craftsmanship in Onuzulike’s nets capture the eye and convey complex stories that are specific in their detail but universal in their effect.
Ozioma Onuzulike, Peacock Weave (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Marc Straus Gallery.
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For thousands of years, ginseng has been believed to help to boost energy levels, and it’s likely to be in-demand this week in South Korea as Seoul Art Week returns. Programming around the sophomore edition of Frieze Seoul and the stalwart fair Kiaf Seoul appears to have grown this year; art world players are also said to be struggling with organizing their schedule because there are just too many gallery dinners, parties, and art openings to attend.
In sum, the packed event list can be seen as a vote of confidence for the market in South Korea despite recent reports of sales decline. Besides openings at commercial galleries, top international auction houses are staging large-scale exhibitions that are not to miss. Christie’s is teaming up with Hyundai Card (a credit card company of Hyundai Motor Group) to stage “Heads On: Basquiat & Warhol,” a $150 million spectacle of works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol.
For its part, Sotheby’s will be presenting “Love in Paradise,” an exhibition that unites Banksy and Keith Haring, featuring the South Korean public debut of Banksy’s famed shredded artwork Girl without Balloon (2021). And Phillips has assembled works by more than 30 artists from around the world, including up-and-coming artists and blue chip names, for the selling exhibition “Briefly Gorgeous” at Songwon Art Center.
Those who are keen on discovering Korean talents should check out shows staged by the art world arms of the fashion giants Prada and Hermes, which will each be presenting Korean artists, or head to the MMCA and Songeun Art and Cultural Foundation, which are respectively staging group exhibitions of Korean contemporary art.
We sifted through the long lists of shows and events and plucked out five exhibitions that deserve your attention.
Kim Beom: “How to become a rock”On view at Leeum through December 3
Kim Beom, Swan (2004). Courtesy Leeum Museum of Art. ⓒ Kim Beom.
The opening of Kim Beom’s show at Leeum in July was met with great expectations; the exhibition is the first major solo presentation of the artist in 13 years, despite the fact that the 60-year-old is championed as one of the most important Korean contemporary artists. The presentation includes quirky installations and conceptual pieces spanning three decades of Kim’s creative output.
Leeum, 60-16, Itaewon-ro 55-gil, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, 04348
Kangja Jung: “Dear Dream, Fantasy, and Challenge”Arario MuseumThrough September 10
Installation view of Kangja Jung: “Dear Dream, Fantasy, and Challenge” ⓒ 2023 ARARIO MUSEUM.
When Kangja Jung first emerged in the Korean art scene with her 1968 performance, Transparent Balloons and Nude, she was dismissed by critics. Jung persevered, becoming a pioneer who was well ahead of her time and who is now recognized as the first known feminist nude performer in South Korea.
As a member of the Korean Young Artists Association Exhibition, she was also at the forefront of the country’s avant-garde art movement before she relocated to Singapore with her family in 1970, effectively vanishing from the Korean art scene for over a decade. Upon returning to Korea in 1981, she focused on painting, transcending her critical spirit onto canvas. This exhibition explores Jung’s journey via archival materials, paintings, and batik works made in the 1970s and ’80s.
Arario Museum, 83, Yulgok-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, 03058
Suh Yongsun: “My Name is Red”Art Sonje CenterThrough October 22
Suh Yongsun, Lying on the Sea (2012). Courtesy the artist and Art Sonje Center.
Born in Seoul in 1951, Suh Yongsun studied painting and is highly regarded in the South Korean art world for his depiction of “human existence,” with his works that often reference historical events or characters with signature broad brushstrokes, bold colors, and rough texture. The aesthetics of his work, which brings together a traditional Korean style with European influences, has set him apart from the popular trend of minimalism in the country.
Art Sonje Center, 87, Yulgok-ro 3-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul, 03062
Lawrence Weiner: “Under the Sun”Amorepacific Museum of ArtThrough January 28, 2024
Lawrence Weiner, SMASHED TO PIECES (IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT) (1976). Courtesy Pace Gallery.
“Under the Sun” marks the artist’s Asian debut and the first expansive solo institutional show after his death in 2021. The show at Amorepacific Museum of Art features 47 text-based sculptures juxtaposed against the institution’s Korean art collection, with an aim to create a new visual dialogue.
Also on view are edition works, drawings, posters, and video by Weiner, as well as acclaimed early works from the 1970s, such as SMASHED TO PIECES (IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT) (1971) and TO SEE AND BE SEEN (1972). Pace Gallery has recently announced that it now represents the artist’s estate in Asia—Weiner’s work will be shown at the gallery’s booth at Frieze Seoul.
Amorepacific Museum of Art, 100 Hangang-daero, Yongsan-gu, Seoul.
Kim Kulim: “Kim Kulim” MMCAThrough February 12
Kim Kulim, Civilization, Woman, Money, film 1969, video 1969-2016, single-channel video, color, sound, 22 min. 10 sec. MMCA collection.
The solo exhibition of Kim Kulim brings together the artist’s expansive body of work from the 1950s to today. Dubbed the founding father of Korean multimedia art, Kim’s paintings from the 1960s, made in the wake of the Korean War, as well as his performances and installations made in decade that followed, have become key reference points in Korean art history. A total of 230 works and 60 pieces of archival materials are included in this career-spanning show.
MMCA, 30 Samcheong-ro 5-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul
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